Bangalore: While executing business strategies and plans, CIOs have to take into account various factors in their respective enterprises and organisations, including workforce, business processes, applications, IT systems and physical infrastructure like datacentres and other facilities.

In order to achieve success from an enterprise perspective, all these factors need to be well in-sync with each other. However, the infrastructure piece comprising of datacentres and facilities does require equal attention as do the workforce, business processes and applications.

Given the size of the infrastructure piece, mostly it is managed by dedicated facility managers which ideally have to work and coordinate in accordance with their respective CIOs in the organisations.

Overall, this would ensure that the organisation is well-managed and all its operations are functioning efficiently, leading to a reduction in the operational cost as well.

Perhaps, that’s not always the case and more than often leads to disagreements and lack of consensus between the CIOs and the facility managers over the information or data related to the infrastructure, resources and its management.

“From any organisation or enterprise perspective, there’s a CIO and facility manager. Generally, the CIO gives information or inputs to the facility manager; however the facility manager is always at loggerheads with the CIO,” says Venkatraman Swaminathan, Schneider Electric’s Vice President & Country General Manager –IT Business, India & SAARC.

“The facility manger always thinks that the CIO over does with the data requirements and would come back to him. And therefore the facility manager would over provide the information for the infrastructure and this is quite obvious as they don’t get in sync,” adds Swaminathan.

In fact, Swaminathan’s organisation Schneider Electric is trying to address this dilemma between the CIOs and facility managers. “We are trying to drive away this dilemma because it is difficult to change the behaviours of the CIOs and their facility managers,” notes Swaminathan.

Further, “So if we want to get them work closely with each other, the best way is to get them on a common dashboard wherein the IT related equipment data and the facility related data comes together,” he adds.

Schneider Electric has come up with EcoStruxure platform -- a single open IoT enabled system that functions and connects across connected products, edge control, apps, analytics and services of the enterprise. It is agnostic to industry equipments and easily integrates with connectable products.

The dashboard will show the common data points fetched from the IT related equipment side as well as the facility. Since it’s a common dashboard it brings transparency, builds mutual trust and harmony between the CIO and the facility manager.

Importantly, it will also help the CIO and the facility manager to drive their respective KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) in a better coordinated way. However, this would be possible only when there’s a common dashboard or platform that can provide some quantifiable and visible data or information.

“Because today if you can’t measure then how will you set KPIs for the CIO and the facility manager?” argues Swaminathan. So it is very important to have a common or single dashboard, he says for both CIO and the facility manager.

The datacentre infrastructure facility, for instance, is a substantial part of the total energy consumption in any enterprise because it remains on all the time and works 24x7 to support all the business processes. And so whatever energy saving is done by the datacentre facility will get amplified as it is a substantial portion of the enterprise’s energy portfolio.

“So if both (CIO and facility manger) have a same KPIs of saving energy, then having a dashboard or an EcoStruxure platform, will help to measure, control, analyse and take corrective actions,” explains Swaminathan.

Based on his discussions with CIOs, Swaminathan claims that many of the CIOs have agreed that they are in this dilemma and the EcoStruxure platform makes it very easy for them.

“And importantly from a customer perspective, they don’t need to have Schneider equipments as long as they have any SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol) based connecting device which can transmit the data and integrate with the platform. So that’s the beauty of the system,” concludes Swaminathan.

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As the Special Chief Secretary & IT Advisor to the Chief Minister - Govt. of Andhra Pradesh, J A Chowdary is all for chasing new growth horizons, pursuing radically different development approaches and outguessing technology trends that will shape the future.

As the Special Chief Secretary & IT Advisor to the Chief Minister - Govt. of Andhra Pradesh, J A Chowdary is all for chasing new growth horizons, pursuing radically different development approaches and outguessing technology trends that will shape the future.